Mother’s teeth

I've had this one on the back burner for a while and as facebook failed to throw anything up (except Happy Star Wars Day) today is the day.

The other morning I wandered, sleep bleary and glassesless, into the bathroom, looked in the mirror and thought "My God you look like your Mother". 

Then thought "Well at least you've still got all your own teeth." 

Which is exactly the sort of thing she would have said …

and why I burst out laughing for no apparent reason …

and started me thinking about Mum’s teeth.

In all the photographs I can think of from my early childhood Mum had a closed lip smile.  It gives her image a slightly mischievous Mona Lisa quality, but I’m afraid it was down to her teeth.

Mum was born in 1918 and I doubt her family had much money for dentistry.   

I’m sure her teeth received attention from the RAF medics when she became a WAAF.  There’s an old wives’ tale that you lose a tooth for every child, so that’s four of them accounted for.  But I believe a poor pre-natal and early diet, cigarettes, mint imperials and an aversion to spending money on herself at the dentists had a more detrimental effect on her teeth.

Part of the reason I'm aware of the lack of teeth is that I can remember the surprise when she got her false ones.  I was 7 and in bed with the measles, it was late February and snowy outside.  Mum came into the bedroom one morning with a hugely swollen face.  Those were the days when GPs visited and Dr Phillips came to see us most days to check on my measles, and see how Granma’s hardening arteries were going while he was there.  It wasn’t unusual for him to pop in on his way past to check on Granma.  He took one look at Mum and told her to go straight to the dentist as she obviously had abscesses.   

There were some weeks (or so it seemed) of Mum coming home with a mouth full of cotton wool and her face swathed in a scarf against the cold and stares.  Then one day she came in wearing her false teeth and the difference was amazing.   

She had a smile.

Our home was a bungalow built by our great-grandparents in the 1920s, before there was mains water to our village, and was a little eccentric in that the bathroom led off the kitchen.  Mum and Dad would leave their teeth steeping overnight in plastic pots on the back of the wash-hand basin.  Mum would sometimes get distracted whilst rinsing them off in the morning and leave them lying in the basin whilst she went to attend to whatever was more important than putting her teeth in.  This meant that sometimes when I got up for school they lay by the plughole grinning up at me.

For most of my childhood ours was a three-generation household. 

Granma passed away when I was 13 freeing Mum from caring duties.   

She got a job in the village school as a School Meals Supervisor (definitely not a dinner lady), and was provided with royal blue lab-coat style overalls.   

When she retired in the mid-1980s she brought them home “because they might be useful for something.”  

Tragically this intelligent, self-educated, dynamic, spirited woman developed Alzheimer’s.

Realising that our parents would, eventually, most likely spend their final days in a care home (we all live away and uprooting them would have been too cruel), Bigsister and Middlesister decided to start ‘sorting out the house’ in the 1990s.  This may sound premature but we are hoarders, throwing nothing away unless it is completely worn out and utterly useless.  Mum, having lived through the poverty of the Depression and bringing up four children during post war austerity, was particularly inclined to keep things “just in case”.

Imagine the scene.

It is Easter time and I am at home with baby Ferretfingers, who is still breastfeeding.  We are sitting in the living room with Dad who is doing the Western Mail crossword.  It is mid-evening and all is peaceful and silent.

Mum and the sisters are going through a wardrobe in one of the bedrooms.

Suddenly there is a shrieking and thundering of footsteps in the passage and they burst into the living-room.

First Bigsister whirls in looking horrified, gibbering “Oh My Gawd I touched them” and throws herself into a chair.

Then Middlesister trying to supress her giggles and holding something in a paper hanky.

Finally Mum with a look of mischievous childlike glee on her face.

Bigsister had insisted on going through the pockets of every garment “in case there’s a fiver in there.”

She had put her hand into the pocket of Mum’s School Meals Supervisor overall and brought out … 

a set of false teeth.

We will never know why Mum had the teeth in her overall. 

None of us could remember her losing any, including Dad.

We surmised she must have been wearing in a new set and put the old set in her pocket to swap if her gums got uncomfortable.

She was unable, or unwilling, to tell us.

But I shall never ever forget that gleeful smile.